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Memory chips that hold their content without power being applied. It may refer to chips that are not changeable, such as ROMs and PROMs, or to chips that can be rewritten many times such as flash memory. However, USB flash drives, along with hard drives and solid state drives (SSDs), are non-volatile storage devices, not non-volatile memory. See ROM, PROM, memory types, storage vs. memory and future memory chips.

Core Memory Was Non-Volatile

The first widely used internal memory employed magnetic cores strung together with wires, and the cores held their content without power. About 30" high, this Dataram module provided 32KB of RAM for a Data General minicomputer in 1967. See core storage.